Visor Vanity

The other day I hopped into a car with a few friends and started my normal on-the-highway daydreaming routine. My brain was flat-lining as I watched the little white lines wiz by and I began to reverie of happy things. On this particular occasion, I believe the daydream involved a beautiful woman and a lot of ice cream. Anyway, my thoughts were interrupted when my friend in the passenger seat pulled down the visor and looked at herself intently in the mirror. She stared for a while, squinted and then opened her mouth for an oral inspection. There were no visible marks on her face, she wasn’t adding makeup, her hair looked well quaffed and she hadn’t eaten anything in the last two hours so she wasn’t conducting post facto dental hygiene. In short, there were no conceivable reasons for her to be using the visor at that moment.

Now, we all know and love girls. This post isn’t meant to knock girls – that subject has gotten old – rather it is a critique of what I like to call Visor Vanity: the urge a passenger has to use the car’s built in mirror to ensure that their good looks remain intact. This phenomenon isn’t isolated to girls; I have, on more than one embarrassing occasion, caught myself pulling down the visor for a quick peek. And I am not a girl. It’s not that I’m particularly sensitive about my features (I often go through my morning routine without ever glancing at the mirror, but that’s probably because it is so covered in grime that such a look wouldn’t be productive) or that I seek regular approval (excepting, of course, in my love life) or that I am very, very extremely vain.

So why do we thus abuse the visor? I think it has something to do with the popularity of photographs.

In the old days, pictures weren’t that common. Most of them were grainy, black and white and, if you go back far enough, daguerreotypes. Mirrors were the only opportunity to find out how we looked. Today, with every trinket on the market photo-enabled – from the cell phones that take pictures, to those little cameras over stoplights – our picture can be found all over the place. The other day I even found a picture of myself in the local obituaries. I am still trying to figure out why I was thus honored. Anyway, pictures give us the likeness that others see while a mirror provides the mathematical opposite of that image. When we see a picture, an image of ourselves is ingrained in our minds. But when we look in the mirror, that picture is contradicted. In an effort to convince ourselves that either the photo or the mirror is accurate, we must constantly look in the mirror. Some people have a similar problem called Photo Vanity, but that only occurs in the left-handed.

Test this out. Grab a picture of yourself and go to the mirror. Which image do you like better? The one in the mirror or the one in the photo? Odds are you’ll like the mirror better.

In response to Visor Vanity, I have taken a picture of myself and put it up as my background on my cell phone and computer and pasted it all over my bedroom, coving a full length mirror. This picture reinforces the correct image of myself and, hopefully, obviates the need to pull down the visor.